Microcosms in the Classroom: Student Surnames

Skip the B.S. 

by Skip Eisiminger

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet.”—William Shakespeare’s Juliet

“He said true things but called them by the wrong name.”—Elizabeth Barrett-Browning

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—12/5/11—Ever since the Christmas my wife and children gave me the Dictionary of Surnames (Oxford University Press, 1988), I have told captive audiences where their names originated.

Typically, after a broad discussion of naming practices in a Humanities class, I enjoyed surprising students with a brief explanation of their surnames. [Some of the names herein have been altered to protect the proprietors.] If Oxford or Google did not have an explanation, which happens about 10 percent of the time, I reported on a student’s first or middle name, not to appear empty handed.

One year, I struggled with a Miss Lara Lack’s surname. She’d told me that her family had emigrated from Russia in the late 19th century, but none of my resources, including a woman who teaches Russian, were any help. In class, after I’d apologized for my failure, the student said, “I should have told you that when my grandparents emigrated, some clerk at Ellis Island was unable to make heads or tails of Lachiskaia, so for lack of a better name, we became the Lack family.”

Over the years that I’ve been rummaging through the name drawer, I’ve been consistently struck by the way most of my classes offer a neat microcosm of medieval culture.

Occasionally a Korean such as Kyungsun Kim, or a Nigerian like Karla KikaKuudjiku sneaks into the line-up, which is fine, of course but, usually, my mostly Southeastern American students reflect a European heritage. A few years ago, I taught a young Muslim woman from Malaysia named Norbaya B.T. Hj Katana. As soon as I had a decent chance, I asked her about her puzzling name. She said basically it means, “I am Norbaya, the daughter of [B.T.] Mr. Katana, who has been on a hajj [Hj] to Mecca.”

Unfortunately, most American names do not present such a detailed narrative, but they do have fascinations of their own.

One young man, whose family came from northern Italy, is named John Sinisgaulli. I asked him if he knew the origin of his last name, and he said he’d asked his parents and grandparents, but no one knew. I told him there was a good chance his Ur-ancestor was a left-handed interloper from France. Whether he’d been to Mecca remains unrecorded.

Another former student, States Rights Jaworski, has a name that reveals far more about his parents’ political leanings than a Polish surname meaning “one who lives beneath a sycamore tree.” It’s a fair guess that his folks haven’t been to Mecca either.

In September of 2010, I undertook my name exercise one more time before retiring. True to form, the microcosm I’d come to expect over the last 20 years reappeared. In a class of 30, I discovered 15 English, six German, four French-Norman, three Norse, and two Scots-Irish names.

Over half the names were about evenly divided between the habitation and occupational types, with ornamental, patronymic, and saintly allusions filling in the remainder. In the early 21st century, I had before me descendents of a 14th-century tool sharpener (“Whetzel”), a wrestler (“Resler”), two soldiers (“Bowman” and “Finley”), an inn keeper (“Hosler”), a mountain dweller (“Berglund”), a harness maker (“Burrell”), a church warden (“Sexton”), a wheelwright (“Wright”), a barrel maker (“Cooperman”), two servants (“McElhaney” and “Hall”), a former mayor (“Moyer”), two farmers (“Fields” and “Ackermann”), a forester (“Kiefer”), and three admirers of the saints Martin, Hugh, and Cannock.

I also had the great (multiplied by 25) grandchildren of William, Hain, John, and Rolf’s sons. I had students with DNA from families who’d once lived in LeMans and Lyons, France; Halle, Germany; and Devonshire, England.

I had distant relatives of those who’d made their living as a cherry orchardist in Germany, a hay farmer in Wales, and a woodcutter in Ireland. Indeed, I had a roomful of English majors studying the history of their language . . . and most were not even aware that they were carrying Old and Middle English scraps of a great tattered quilt.

Despite the work I put into the class on names, many students want to see for themselves what Oxford has to say, and I can’t say that I blame them.

Many have been told by grandparents some story conflicting with Oxford, so I always bring my dictionary to class and pass it around for the skeptical and curious to peruse. I tell them to be sure to read through all the possibilities, because many names have more than one origin. When that occurs, I usually pick the most flattering to broadcast.

In the case above of Mr. Burrell, the harness maker, Oxford also says some of the Burrells were “judicial torturers.” After class, Mr. Burrell came by to tell me that he did not blame me for the information Oxford had imparted, for he was accustomed to being teased about his name. Because he bore the same name as his father and grandfather, his friends dubbed him Mr. Burrell “Da Turd.”

Perhaps the most difficult moment when speaking of student surnames comes when dealing with the African-American names.

In 2009, I had three such names: a Chapman, whose name is Middle or Old English for a merchant; a Fielding, whose Middle English name refers to one living on land cleared of forest but not yet plowed; and a Koon, whose Irish name described a comely man.

Since I am unaware of any Africans living in Great Britain in the 14th and 15th centuries, when most Englishmen were required by law to take surnames, “Chapman,”“Fielding,” and “Koon” presented a problem. I asked the students in question if they or their parents had traced their families’ names to a time before the 1863 emancipation, and all said that no one they knew of had been successful though several had tried. Young Mr. Koon volunteered that he was “James Koon the IV” and despite the bitter irony inherent in his name, he had no intention of changing a relict his ancestors had borne with dignity for 150 years.

I said I understood. As a resident of South Carolina, I was a “Sandlapper” like him and four million others.

Though the nickname originated to describe people so poor they had to eat sand or clay to fill their bellies, I had no intention of moving to another state because some had been forced into geophagy. “Sandlapper” today, like the Koon surname, is a proud survivor of worse times in Ireland and the United States. Sometimes, we forget that progress is real, and our names offer some of the best evidence we have of it.